Books by Former Christians

[robrecht]

I applaud these and all other efforts to expose Christian misreadings and distortions of the Jewish scriptures. To be fair, however, one might also recognize that these distortions began as a product of their time and were not necessarily practiced in bad faith. One can already see rather similar pesher exegesis in the Jewish Dead Sea Scrolls that preceded the origins of the Christian scriptures. Similarly, much of later Rabbinic exegesis would also certainly not pass muster among modern Jewish or critical scriptural hermeneutics. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Jewish scriptural exegesis over the centuries has, in my opinion, tended toward humble, dialogical, self-critical, sometimes even a humorous awareness of our limited understanding of the mystery of God, whereas fundamentalist Christian interpretations of the Jewish scriptures seem to always tend toward narrow-minded, dogmatic, anti-Semitic readings.